Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Against the standard narrative of human sexual evolution - Less Wrong

7 Post author: WrongBot 23 July 2010 05:28AM

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Tags: sex_at_dawn evpsych gender science

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 23 July 2010 10:35:04AM *  17 points [-]

Haven't read the book yet, but here's the supporting evidence I gathered from the Amazon.com preview and the authors' website and blog. (I probably missed some so please add to the list.)

  • females have potential for multiple orgasms
  • higher popularity of pornography with one female and multiple males compared to one male and multiple females
  • female copulatory vocalizations
  • male anatomy indicating sperm competition
  • Coolidge effect in females
  • it fits better with "fierce egalitarianism" of forager bands: female sexual exclusivity is necessary for males to determine paternity, but if all resources are equally shared, then there is little point in knowing paternity
  • ETA: our closest primate relations, chimps and bonobos, have "multimale-multifemale mating systems"

On a separate note, while it seems plausible that the authors of the book are right that our forager ancestors were polyamorous, it's not clear why that matters to us in making our own choices, given that our ancestors switched over to monogamy/polygyny as soon as agriculture was invented.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2010 03:14:04AM 8 points [-]

higher popularity of pornography with one female and multiple males compared to one male and multiple females

Supply-driven. Male actors are much cheaper.

Comment author: WrongBot 24 July 2010 03:28:18AM 9 points [-]

Men viewing erotic material suggestive of sperm competition (two men with one woman) produce ejaculates containing a higher percentage of motile sperm than men viewing explicit images of only three women.

(Ryan and Jethá, 231, referring to research by Kilgallon and Simmons)

Comment author: Sniffnoy 24 July 2010 04:52:13AM 4 points [-]

I'm finding it a bit hard to draw that conclusion from this when there's no precisely-one-male-present condition, and I don't see any mention of any experiments that did do that in the actual article, either. It could just be due to the presence of a male, and not the number of them.

Perhaps more importantly, it's also not clear that what pornography men like should correlate with what causes them to produce more motile sperm!

Comment author: Psychohistorian 26 July 2010 04:18:29AM 1 point [-]

I would be surprised if a greater number of male actors does not also result in a salary increase for the actress. This does not contradict your point, but it may undermine it; I'm hardly familiar with pay structures. More significantly, what would you need to observe to conclude it was demand-driven?

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